According to J.K. Rowling, "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" should be impossible

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a polarizing addition to the Harry Potter canon mainly because, uh, it undoes the beautiful bow that J.K. Rowling tied up her seven-book series with. Regardless of your feelings for the authorized play though, one writer at Seventeen may have just proven that the events in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child couldn’t have happened — all based on the words of Rowling herself 😮

"All attempts to travel back further than a few hours have resulted in catastrophic harm to the witch or wizard involved. It was not realised for many years why time travellers over great distances never survived their journeys."

While Albus and Scorpius Malfoy weren’t going centuries in the past, they did go back decades. Not to mention, the final time travel venture in The Cursed Child has the whole gang — Harry, Hermione, and Ron included — going back to the day Harry’s parents died on October 31st, ‎1981‎.

If Rowling says that time travelers can only go back a few hours or else they will die, then nothing that happened in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child makes ANY sense.

To be fair, this information about time travel comes from an incomplete and unreliable guide, so perhaps there are exceptions to the rule. However, if you like to pretend that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child doesn’t exist and is merely fan-fiction (ahem, guilty as charged), then you have Stiegman to thank for validating your dismissal of the play. If you did love the play, then go back in time a few hours and pretend you never read this.